A Critical Review of the Scholarly Discourse on Gambling Disorder Treatment

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive review of the scholarly discourse on psychological and relational approaches to gambling disorder treatment. The article focuses on the “what” of knowledge production and treatment delivery by systematizing information on the types of scholarly articles that have been published in the English language; the treatment approaches that have been researched and discussed in the Anglophone literature; and the context of knowledge production over the past 50 years. The review includes 445 articles that present the findings of case studies and evaluations of disordered gambling interventions (k = 231), descriptive research (k = 49), meta-analyses (k = 10), and literature reviews and descriptions of novel approaches (k = 155). The findings show that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), together with its constituent approaches, was the most discussed and researched approach to gambling disorder treatment in the period between late 1960s and the first half of 2019, covered by about 60% of the articles. Motivational Interviewing approaches were discussed in over one-fifth of the articles, whereas psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches accounted for under 10% of the articles. Roughly three-quarters of articles included in the review were published in North American and international journals. Our discussion situates these trends in critical discourses of the medicalization of mental health, dominance of Western mental health frameworks, and the politics of knowledge production.

Moving Prevention of Gambling Harm Upstream: Opportunities in Social Policy and Research

“…There is also significant internal resistance in past and present research on gambling harm and its prevention. It is still dominated by scholars who favour pathologising approaches and quantitative methods, most of whom belong to the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and medicine (Shaffer et al, 2020;Christensen et al, 2022). The inclusion of other approaches and methods capable of analysing structural and political questions about gambling, coming from psychology, sociology or geography, among other disciplines, remains in dispute (Cassidy et al, 2013).…”

“…Despite these unfavourable prospects, RCTs have a strong presence in the literature on GD prevention and treatment, as the number of evaluation RCTs on GD treatment has doubled in the last 20 years (Christensen et al, 2022). The vast majority of these evaluation studies are published in gambling journals whose audience is composed of psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, and treatment providers (Ibid., p. 39).…”

“…Of course, these trends raise questions about the complementarity of knowledge produced by different disciplines. If the evidence produced by researchers in psychology, business, and medicine constitutes the majority of scientific production and is propelled by specific research questions and methods (Christensen et al, 2022), contributions from minority disciplines (in this field) such as sociology, geography, economics, or cultural studies face difficulties in integrating into the dominant stream. However, this does not constitute an essentialist perspective on these dominant disciplines, far from it: there are very diverse perspectives, for example, within psychology and most of them are fully compatible with the critical approaches displayed in other domains.…”